A colossus of blogging activity! October 2018
Throughout my blogging experience on chess.com, I have learnt that there is so much that can be written, so many vast topics to cover, and that imagination is never-ending. It's so great to see how creative and intelligent the chess community is!
Hello everyone, welcome back to my 2nd monthly report of Top 5 Blogs and Top 3 Bloggers. This time it was much more difficult for me to choose these. This was truly a month where remarkable blogs were written. Makes me want to write the Top 10 Blogs... This month was a "Colossus of Blogging Activity".
Oh. It's my 25th blog as a top blogger! Silver! Thank you everyone! It's been very enjoyable and a pleasure to write on this site and all feedback on my blog is very much appreciated!
This month marked the revivals and arrivals of a few bloggers 
The blogging world has been growing a lot recently!
It also marked the coming of rotation system developed by the staff. In case you are wondering what it is, one blog at a time used to get front page publicity. Now, every 5 mins a blog from a pool of blogs written in the last 48 hours appear on the front page. Thank you chess.com!!
It also.. Ah! I realise that we should begin..
Top 5 Blogs of October 2018
#5: Hermanis Matisons, a great Latvian master
This was a blog by @introuble2 about a forgotten chess legend, a great player and composer. It was a nice historical review, of course the format could be better and there were some unnecessary contents (otherwise it might have been much ahead in my list! 
) but overall I really liked going through the article as it introduced me to something new.
A great piece of writing by @Illingworth , delving to the often neglected Hippopotamus Setup, and providing us with some instructive ideas for this opening. The basics are always important! What I also really liked was the catchy title, and the story of 'Brutus'.
#3: The Classic Sicillian, Fabulous Kramnik, and the Inexhaustible Nature of Chess
This was a lengthy, detailed post by @kamalakanta. By going through this brilliant article I can now say I know much more about the Classic Sicillian! He used clear, to the point examples. Yes, chess is really inexhaustible!
#2: Carlsen vs Caruana: personalities and styles
This was a refreshing preview of the upcoming World Championship 2018. I really liked @ddt_ru 's style of writing, the way he referred to Carlsen as "spieler" and Caruana as "method" and compared these two players with the masters of the past. Well done!
#1: Comparing the D-Pawn Systems (Part 2)
This was a follow up to the previous post of Comparing the D-Pawn Systems (eschewing 2.c4) by @IndreRe which also had the #1 posting in my September monthly report. This blog (as well as the previous part) contained huge amount of instruction on these openings and I have no way to express this guy's work. I am speechless. 
This post was written just in the starting days of October, and at the time I commented that I am betting this will once again be #1 in my monthly report.. Thanks Indrek! These two parts were refreshingly amazing!
Top 3 Bloggers of October 2018
#3: Kamalakanta Nieves (@kamalakanta)
Kamalakanta is an ocean of historical knowledge. He is one of those people who appreciates and respects just about any great player in chess history. From what I see he is an avid reader, and always has great thoughts to share.
#2: GM Max Illingworth (@Illingworth)
Just a few months ago, Illingworth was a very active blogger. Suddenly, he stopped writing for long. This month was his comeback, and one after the other, he kept writing good blogs! He mostly writes short posts just about anything which may help us. He writes on a wide range of topics, and doesn't hesitate to provide great analysis for free!
#1: FM Andrey Terekhov (@ddt_ru)
A new face? Yeah! But an awesome one! I was very impressed by Andrey's work on Carlsen-Caruana and also his two-part series on the knight on f5. I would not give any detailed explanation. One glance at his blog and you are sure to become a follower!
(probably you would like to add @vinniethepooh somewhere in the list? )
So, that was my review for this month of exciting blogging. What do you think were the top 5 blogs? And who were your 3 favourite bloggers?
